The Future is a harsh mistress

Living for the future is a good way to be let down.  I once paid for a used car in five months.  I worked two jobs simultaneously for a month to save up for the down payment and averaged four hours of sleep per night that whole month.  One job was pizza delivery, and the other was a waitress on the graveyard shift at a Denny's.  I enjoyed my day job, but my car was falling apart.  I took the waitress job thinking I would be working a couple nights a week.  The manager started scheduling me full time as soon as I was trained.  That job really sucked the life out of me.  There was one night about three weeks in where I wanted to walk out, but I was too tired to walk home and I didn't have my car that night.  As soon as I bought a replacement car, I quit that job.  After I finished paying for my car, I took a promotion to assistant manager at the pizza joint.  This promotion involved a huge pay cut since I wasn't getting tips anymore from delivery.  I went from laying down lots of money on a new lemon and still having extra cash to spend to having no car payment and no extra money.

I hurried to pay for that car because I wanted my budget clear to go back to college.  I didn't want any debt to weigh down my conscience when I needed all my will to finish school.  Eventually I got enough from loans and scholarships to quit working and just focus on school.  Then I got hit by a truck...so I'm told.  When making a left turn, I was rear ended by a truck whose driver fell asleep.  I hit my head, lost a lot of blood, and lost all memory of the incident.  All I got as proof were a few pictures of a car with a body half the length of the one I bought and the frame sticking out from the bottom.  My plan to take care of my future was dashed in an instant.  My so-called friends would not give me rides to get a new job or to go to the university in the next town over.  I realized that I had placed the bulk of my faith in material investments and shallow people.  I was sorely depressed for a long time.  I finally moved away for a long while just to get a clean break from loser friends and unemployment.

The point of my story is that the future cannot be reliably planned.  I often find myself easily convinced that if I work really hard, I can get ahead of my debt and be free.  When I fall into this mentality, I find that I'm far more easily stressed because every tiny thing that clashes with my well laid plans causes my dream future to get further and further away.  I'm tired of chasing carrots dangling from sticks.  Am I going to curl up in the fetal position until the big mean future goes away?  No, I've tried that a few times and can honestly tell you that it doesn't work.  Instead I'm going to use what I actually have: now.  I have now, and the future is just a shadow being cast by the past as the present shines through it.  Though the past is unchanging, it is not written in stone.  The past is the amalgamation of memories that we choose to keep alive.  These memories feed on energy that we give it in the now.  All energy lives in the now.  Now is the only time you have to change your life or even to take action to keep it the same.

I calculated how long it would take to pay back my student loans at what I would consider a minimum payment.  The answer is eight years.  That's not as bad as I thought it would be last year when I was breaking my brain trying to get the loans paid off in three years.  The truth is, I would be making a far better investment by keeping some of those funds for investment in my now than my later.  If it takes me three years to pay off my debt, but during that time I have to be bored out of my skull because I can't afford to have fun, then I will have freedom from debt but no will to use it wisely.  I would have only earned laziness in that time because that's all that boredom has to offer me.  Instead I will pay off my loans slowly but surely, and use the extra cash to try new things and keep learning and growing.  I believe more than anything that personal development is by far the most valuable investment anyone can make.

Already, I have lost 10 pounds without damaging my metabolism or my health.  I used to think that I would only ever have time or money but not both at once.  However, if I can reshape my own body for the better without breaking myself, then it seems to me that fixing my finances is not such a far fetched goal, either.  If I sacrifice all that I have to pay off debt, I might find freedom in a few years, but that doesn't mean that it won't be immediately replaced with another burden or misfortune.  I realize that this is a pessimistic way of looking at the future, but if my ultimate goal is happiness, then I should focus on learning to be happy instead of learning to be free of debt.  The debt will go away no matter what I do because I will still pay the bill.  What I really need to invest in is my creativity.  I have a feeling if my creative side is well nourished, the rest of me will be fine no matter what happens.

Every Goal is Daily

It doesn't matter how many times you have done something good.  Doing the right thing today is a conscious choice.  Making the same choice day after day is not always easy.  A choice becomes routine, then it becomes a part of life.  If something comes along later that makes you question why you do something a certain way, will you still remember the answer?  A lot of what people do on a regular basis is habit, either to build toward a goal or to pass the time.  Part of reaching a goal is remembering why that goal is necessary.  If you were trying to lose weight and became malnourished, then you would have to stop adjust your plans.

Sometimes while working to attain a goal, interruptions occur and throw us off track of sensible reasoning.  What seems feasible one minute may seem completely impossible the next due to some tiny detail that sticks out.  Often I have to reevaluate what I really want as I work toward a goal.  Working on improving my safety becomes irrelevant when it involves staying home and never doing anything exciting.  Maintaining a budget seems irrelevant when I can't pay off my debt.  I've created so many budgets in the past and given up on them because I wasn't making enough to cover my expenses let alone support my own creativity.  Watching my finances slip further into the red was not a fun thing to do, but attempting to manage them was still good practice.  Sometimes goals have the right idea behind them, but they aren't the right tool at the right time for creating the solution.  For example, all my budgeting was not going to pay off my student loan debt, but going back to college and finishing my degree has put me in a position that makes freedom from debt possible.  I made school harder than it had to be by focusing on the debt instead of what I really wanted.  Getting out of debt is not a goal, it's a side effect.  

This year, my goal is to grow food in my yard that I can eat.  I started planning this goal last year, and since then I have added on other mini-goals as bonuses.  I started following the Primal Blueprint which influences my food choices and stamina, encouraging the possibility and desire to garden.  Every time I do something that puts me noticeably closer to my goal, I get a new wave of excitement and energy to fuel me forward.  

Then there are times when my faith in the goal completion waivers.  My mental and physical energy lull and motivation seems rather pointless.  It is during these times that I have to remember what makes me happy.  I stop to analyze the routines in my life and look for the fun and the fulfillment in them.  I look back on what feels like tedium in repetitive actions and paint those memories in a good light for activities that have been rewarding and a dim light for those that were just time sinks.  By strengthening the perception of helpful occupations and intentionally forgetting useless pastimes, I can engineer my reflexes to react differently next time these opportunities come up.  This method has helped me to spend less time on computer gaming and more time on real successes.

If the monotony of repeating so much every day doesn't seem worth it to achieve a goal, try Polyphasic sleep and you will feel like you are only repeating daily activities once a week.

Winter + Illness < Motivation + Resolve

After baking through a 102F fever for 3 days, I found motivation a little hard to find.  What a great time to get into the early release of Star Wars: The Old Republic mmo.  Yes, I took it easy on the weekend and did nothing that required motivation.  As the new year closes in, I'm reminded of my gardening goal in 2012.  Nothing is going to keep me back from that.  I'm going to grow vegetables and possibly fruit and eat it.  New Years is my favorite time of year because I like making big resolutions and planning out how I might achieve them.

This year I have a budget in my favor.  I've been working like a dog trying to keep tabs on my spending, and so far I have been successful.  Budgeting takes practice and creativity.  As much as I want to garden this year, my ultimate goal is to pay off my student loans.  That is a goal that will take longer than one year.  In fact, it will take 2 years, and it should be paid off no later than the end of 2013.  My loans were not small, but they weren't Ivy League huge either.  Every semester of college was funded almost entirely through loans.  I could easily pay them off slowly over 20 years, but I despise debt so I am paying them off in 2 years, hence my shoestring budget.  Being able to build up a functioning garden while scraping by on half my income is a feat of strength which keeps motivation in mind and keeps my chin up.  Even if I fail at growing edible food, I will have less debt when I start over with growing a garden.